


Light Up a Candle

by arkhamcycle



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, antics, by doing absolutely nothing, dave's house is "haunted" and klaus is here to "help", i was lying around at 1 am and i asked myself, tomfoolery, what if klaus... was ghost adventures
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-03
Updated: 2019-04-03
Packaged: 2020-01-01 12:24:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18334487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arkhamcycle/pseuds/arkhamcycle
Summary: House haunted? House maybe haunted? House definitely not haunted? Klaus Hargreeves is here to help! Join network television’s number one certified spirit medium as he yells at ghosts, breaks things, and fakes being possessed for ratings.





	Light Up a Candle

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from this musical masterpiece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY5ZvNrb7H0 
> 
> i have no idea what exactly it is that i am doing

“So how much of this is staged?” is the first question Dave Katz asks him. 

Klaus startles a bit. “Staged?” he repeats. 

“Yeah, you know. How much of it is improv, and how much do they write out for you? Or—” Dave pauses for a second and turns his head, his cheeks coloring. “I mean, do you really…”

“See ghosts?” Klaus giggles. He knows it’s the question most people want to ask him— how much of it is real? How much of it is just him putting on a show? But it’s rare that someone is this upfront with it, especially someone who’s trying to claim his house is haunted. Most of his clients at least pretend to be in on the joke. “I thought you’d seen a few yourself, mister.”

Dave laughs, sort of nervous. He has a nice strong chin, Klaus notes, and a bright, white smile. “Well—uh—” 

“No, I get it, I get it! It’s all good. You believe what you want. I’m just here to do my job.” Dave grins at him. Klaus grins back, gives him a wink. Dave blushes again. Behind them, Vanya sets her daylight camera up on its tripod. Someone calls his name—one of the women from hair and makeup, the new one, whose name Klaus can’t really be bothered to learn. He turns away from Dave and heads off to have his hair mussed up or his eyeliner fixed or whatever it is.

Seeking Spirits has grown into one hell of a large team, pun intended. In the beginning it was just Klaus, cheap fruit-scented incense bought from Spencer’s on an employee discount, and a shitty garage sale camcorder, and he sold the footage on VHS for a little extra cash (read: drug money) on the side. Then word got around that that Umbrella kid—yeah, the psychic one, the one who talked to ghosts—was going around investigating haunted houses. Remember all those Umbrella kids? Yeah, weren’t they something? You can buy it on video, you know. It’s crazy stuff. Like he really sees something there.

So the show started to pick up traction. Klaus would stand around at the mall and sell the tapes on a subscription service out of a kiosk in the center aisle. Ben, obviously, was there from the start, and then Vanya joined up after deciding she didn’t have anything at all better to do, and then they sent one of the tapes to the Travel Channel, and that was that. New episodes every Saturday!

But here’s the thing: there just aren’t that many ghosts. Klaus as a kid was, shall we say, misled by the general environment about the number of genuine spirits one was likely to encounter day-to-day. The Hargreeves family was practically swimming in slighted, vengeful, pained souls. Mission casualties. The mausoleum, that memory that still makes him shudder. In the real world, though, the world outside of the high-flying, heroic fantasy the Academy tried to force-feed him, people usually die quiet. The dead as a whole don’t have much of a reason to stay behind. Instead they go off all calm to wherever it is they go, and leave the living—and Klaus—alone. Mostly.

So yeah, Seeking Spirits is staged to Jupiter and back. And it’s the best damn time Klaus has ever had in his life. 

Dave, who has been made to feel remarkably awkward in his own apartment, stands in the corner in front of Vanya’s tripod and watches as the woman reapplies Klaus’s eyeliner. Her pencil pokes his eyeball through the lid. “Watch it!” he says. The woman huffs and finishes the job, and hands him a mirror. He runs his fingers through his hair to mess it up a little bit. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Ben settle down next to him. 

“How do I look?”

“Horrible,” Ben replies.

“Aw, thanks. You too.”

Ben gives him that look, like he’s caught Klaus eating stale popcorn off the floor at the movies.  “You are not seriously going to wear that on television.”

Klaus looks down over his outfit. He’s got on a black mesh crop top and tight leather pants, laced up with ribbon at the sides. “What?” he asks, mock-offended. “Is it off-brand?”

Ben sighs. “You can see your nipples, Klaus.”

Klaus snaps back with “If you don’t like ‘em, don’t look at ‘em,” and then the director calls out that Dave’s interview starts in two, so he’d better get back over there. Klaus stands up and sidles over to Dave’s corner again. Dave gives him a nervous thumbs-up.

“Sorry if I offended you earlier. I didn’t mean to imply that—that I thought you were a fraud, or anything,” Dave says earnestly. “I’m a little antsy is all. Never been on TV before.”

“Camera shy?” Dave nods. His eyes flit noticeably down over Klaus’s chest, his bare stomach. “Well, I don’t think there’s any reason to be. You’ve got a real nice face for it,” Klaus tells him, and he smiles again. Klaus hears the beep of the standing camera, and then Vanya moves with her handheld to get a better angle on Dave’s face.

“Interview, take one, in three— two—”

Klaus cracks his knuckles behind his back and stands up straight. 

“So tell me a little about what’s been going on in this house.”

“Well, the place was built in the late 18, early 1900s I think. And now my apartment is in what used to be the attic. So— I’ve been seeing shadows, you know, in the corner of my eye. Humanoid shadows moving in ways shadows aren’t supposed to move. And then sometimes I’ll step into a sorta pocket of cold air, like the kind that makes all your hair stand on end, only you can tell it isn’t a draught because it goes all the way through your bones. It’s almost unnatural.”

Klaus nods along as Dave talks. He’s describing a textbook haunting: too vague to debunk, but just specific enough to plausibly attribute to ghosts. Perfect. “And then last week you said you were attacked?”

“Yeah,” Dave confirms, and lifts up his shirt at the edge. Vanya edges past Klaus and zooms in. Three long scars, like claw marks, wrap around Dave’s stomach over the hip. Earlier the makeup lady touched them up, “just for the camera,” to make them more visible. No way of knowing whether there was anything there before at all. Klaus doesn’t care, though. 

Dave continues. “There was a power outage. I was in the shower when all of the sudden the water turned cold, like, freezing, and everything was suddenly all dark. Pitch-black. I got out of the shower and started drying off and then I felt this sharp scratching sensation on my stomach all of a sudden, like I had been attacked. Then the power came back on and there was nothing there.”

“This happened in the bathroom?” Klaus asks with a sort of implied sigh. 

Puzzled, Dave nods.

“What he’s saying,” Vanya cuts in, “is that he’d really appreciate if you remembered the event a little differently, or else one of us is going to be sitting in your bathroom all night trying to call out a demon.”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Oh,” Dave laughs. “Uh.” He looks around a second, unsure if it’s okay to rearrange his memory in front of the production crew.

“Go ahead and make our lockdown a teensy bit more comfy,” Klaus urges him playfully. 

The director yells “ _ Cut!”  _ and then “ _ Interview, take two!”  _ and Dave starts over from the top. This time, he was attacked in the kitchen, right by the fridge. Klaus hopes he has Drumsticks in there. 

After the interview they give Dave some time to get all his stuff together and skedaddle. He can’t be here during the lockdown; not the first part of it anyway. They’ve put him up at a hotel nearby. Free breakfast and everything. Pretty sweet deal!

In the early days—the Klaus-and-a-camera-alone days—this was when he would start scoping shit out. What was tied down, what was locked up, what he could sell. He was surprised, in the beginning, how willing these people were to let him run unsupervised through their homes, and just how much they left lying around for him to dig through. Saying he was Klaus Hargreeves, Number Four, the Séance, made folks a tad too trusting. Just because he wasn’t a fraud didn’t mean he wasn’t up to something. 

He doesn’t steal anymore, though. He really did used to need the money—now he doesn’t. Simple as that. There’s too many people in here, besides. He can’t stop his eyes from flitting around, wondering at the value of things, a reflex that’s almost subconscious, but all he’ll take is a Drumstick, as payment for his services, and he’ll leave a few bills on the table when he goes. A little note.  _ Ate some of your ice cream. Thanks! <3 Klaus. _

Dave’s place is nice, looking around. Originally it was a large Victorian family home—built 1890, lived in, abandoned, refurbished, and subdivided up into a bunch of little apartments some five years back. The remodel’s chief goal was to squeeze as many living spaces as possible into one structure, meaning one of the apartments, Dave’s, was clumsily shoehorned into the attic, smooth plaster walls smashing awkwardly against the sloping ceiling. Klaus reckons this unit must have been the cheapest. 

“How many strikes are we looking at this time?” he asks Vanya, who’s running around making little Xs out of tape. 

She pauses and thinks for a second. “We have a night vision and a thermal in the kitchen, then more night vision in the bedroom, bathroom, and living room. And then I have my night rig.”

“Motion sensors?”

“Kitchen and bedroom,” Vanya says.

“Lovely,” Klaus sighs. Seven years down the road it can get a little dull.

This lockdown won’t be so bad, though. Mostly because they’re just in someone’s apartment, and not some old asylum or demon cave, meaning that after they’ve gotten all the footage they need the three of them can stay up and watch movies together on the couch. 

There’s a lull in the action between everything getting set up and the sunset. Vanya heads to the bedroom and tells Klaus to come get her when the sun goes down. Klaus notes this, and imagines she’s probably watching the opening montage of Up to make herself cry for emotional release, as she does every week. He was thinking of going out for dinner before, but he’d feel bad leaving Vanya behind. He considers watching TV, but as soon as he turns it on he sees his face all gaunt and mystic-looking blown up across the screen, as he crouches over a single, flickering candle in a run-down mansion in New Orleans. He remembers that place. There was a real ghost there, a little girl. He’d rather not think about that. Klaus turns the TV off and grabs Dave’s spare key off the hook. He’ll go for a walk.

As he steps into the blank, cramped stairwell, Ben pops up behind him. “Where are we going?”

“Outside.” 

Ben is silent, but still there, Klaus can tell. He fumbles around in his bag for a cigarette as he tramps down the stairs in his heavy boots, and by the time he pushes the door open and stumbles into the cool air of early fall he’s got it lighted. 

Ben takes a moment to remind him that “There’s no smoking in these apartments.” 

“I’m not in the apartments,” Klaus protests. “I’m out the apartments.” 

“You should at least get far enough they can’t see you.”

So he does. He takes a long drag and walks off down the road, lined with tall, graceful trees that dapple the cobblestone street with organic patterns of shade. All the houses through here are ancient. Klaus passes them slowly, one by one, taking in the flaking paint on the porch railings and the round turrets sticking out over the yards. Some of them have been fixed up, but others are gray and rotten and close to falling apart. 

At the end of the street he finds a little cafe built into the first floor of an old brownstone. He walks up to the door and sees it’s closed, but there are tiny metal chairs lining the sidewalk outside. He takes one and props his boots up on a table. 

“Do you think Dave eats here?” he asks, but Ben isn’t around anymore to answer. Something in the infinite nothingness of death must be more interesting than Klaus. 

**Author's Note:**

> edit 4/4/19: hey anyone interested in beta reading this?


End file.
